It's a bit amazing just how much ATC controlled.
Outside of that control, just my thinking on distribution. I'd have to really get very far into who was who and how distribution happened in that industry at the time to have much confidence.
I think outside of the ATC influence if there was any outside of that at all, each factory producing a small brand would have a distribution area. Sort of like how some large businesses today have distributors with a territory.
So Red Sun being packed and shipped from a Louisiana factory would have been sent/sold to the distributors for that factory.
If I was running the brand, I'd also want to line up distributors in major cities people local to my region might travel to since they might want to buy a familiar brand on say a trip to NY or Chicago or DC. But not to distributors in smaller cities or towns outside the usual area.
The larger brands would have more national distribution, so no matter what factory produced them, Piedmonts would get shipped to ATC distributors nearly everywhere.
There wouldn't be much reason to pack differently for different distributors. It's much more efficient to pack everything the same. The only exception would be the really interesting T206 note saying packing for not the Philadelphia area.
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